After all of the hard work the team put in during the offseason, it was finally time. The reveal of the ocean-inspired 2025 FIRST REEFSCAPE game in early January marks the beginning of a seven-week build season leading to the competitions starting at the end of February. This season’s FIRST Robotics Competition game is a simulation of life and work on the ocean floor, what it might be like to harvest algae from a coral reef, and move coral into different positions on the reef, scoring points. Large 16” playground balls are the “algae” while 4” PVC pipes are the stand-ins for coral. What we saw in the game reveal, and now have to figure out, is how to build a robot to interact with the coral reef, algae processor, and more throughout each match. Please watch this animation to see this year’s game
A rookie team member, in awe, lamented “There are so many possibilities for what the robot could do,” highlighting the complexity of this year’s challenge.
Before we as a team worked to create designs for our robot, we participated in the MURA kickoff along with nine other FRC teams, immersing ourselves with the rules in the game manual while additionally discovering viable strategies. As a team member put it, it was quite “fun to bounce ideas with other teams, allowing us to begin the CAD’ing process quickly”.
Between now and the end of February, we will be designing, prototyping, building, coding, optimizing, and practicing driving our robot (already nicknamed ZONE) to pick up and place the algae (balls) and coral (PVC tubes). Testing will begin in mid-February, and our robot will be on display during our Annual Open House at the end of February before we head to Duluth for our first competition of the 2025 season.
Already during our first week of brainstorming and strategy discussion, some consensus is emerging about what to focus on and how to pick up/deposit both the ‘algae’ balls and the ‘coral’ tubes. We post photos of our season, our robot in progress, and our build via this link.
Check out how we meet this challenge, either in Duluth February 28-March 1 at the DECC, and at Mariucci Arena at the University of Minnesota April 4-5.
–By Aneesh A.